Wednesday, September 11, 2013

People escaping the hellish inferno of the building--by jumping to their deaths

In honor of the day, I am posting here an e-mail I wrote that evening, after the day that changed something in all of us:

9/11/01

Dear Everyone Who’s Written to Check On Me Today.
Thanks for your concern. We are in complete shock. That
is, even those of us who had expected something horrible to happen, something
that would be so devastating that it would reach a place beyond our imagination
(*)At nine in the morning I left
my beach house in the Hamptons toward my home in
Port Washington--East Egg on your literary
map--which is 20 miles outside NYC. My writing group was to meetthat night. I was listening to Books-On-Tape,
when, forty-five minutes into my drive, I needed to change a cassette. That’s
when I heard the news. Two planes, one after the other crashed into The World
Trade Center. “Here we go again,” I thought. “Those small planes. I hate them.
They are prone to accidents, flown by amateurs.” But two? The gears engaged in
my brain. Sabotage. An act of terror. The feeling of deja vu--the
events I've witnessed in Israel
from close and far—settled on me with some strange remoteness. The wait was
over. It had finally happened. I called my husband, Ron, whom I had left behind
at the beach house, and told him to turn on the TV. There was an odd utterance
of sounds coming out of him as he watched with disbelief. “Talk,” I implored.Finally he became more
coherent and proceeded to describe what he was seeing. The a scream. “Oh, my God!”“What?” I asked. “What’s
happening?”“Oh, my God! The Building is
falling down.”“What do you mean ‘falling
down?’ It’s just a small plane—”“It’s a jetliner!” I raised the sound on the radio.
They reported about a fire ball thirty stories high.“This is the moment that would
change my life, our life, the world’s life,” I thought. Yet I was too calm.
Five of our kids work in Manhattan—two
daughters and three sons-in-law. I should panic. Something was terribly wrong
with me. On the cell phone, his voice
shaking, Ron insisted I return to the beach house. “They’ll block all the roads
in and out of the city,” he said. “You may not be able to return for a long
time.” “This is the beginning of a
war,” I said. I had been driving for an hour. The notion that the Long Island
Expressway would be closed due to a terrorist attack was absurd. Yet, that was
how things worked in Israel.
Nothing was absurd anymore. Not if the WorldTradeCenter tower fell down.
Fell down? I still thought that only the top floors had collapsed, from the
spot where the plane had hit and upward. I pulled onto the next exit, drove
the bridge over the highway to the south service road, then stopped on the
shoulder. My heart started to beat fast. There was no one around, all was eerily quiet,
the radio turned down again so I could gather myself. I examined the calm with
which I handled the news and knew that, as in time of a crisis, the impact
would hit me later with force that would leave me reeling for a long time. I engaged the gear and began
driving back, calling the kids. They had to evacuate all the tall buildings. My
youngest daughter was in the street when she answered her cell phone. Her
office is located in a basement, and people in her company stayed put. But
since her wall borders the 86th
Street subway station, which is one of the largest
subway intersections, I ordered her to leave. She wanted to go in to inform her
staff.“Call on your cell phone,” I
told her. “Just go home. We haven’t seen the last of the surprises.” She started walking. As did my
other daughter. Soon after, most phone lines to the city were partly
disconnected or overtaxed. Our son-in-law, who lives in Long Island, walked
across the bridge to Brooklyn, where he
hitchhiked home.Ron’s niece, a mother of three
children, the youngest only six months old, works in the building across the
street from the WTC. She managed to flee when her office was hit hard by
debris. In the confusion and black cloud, she found herself on the Staten Island ferry, shoeless and bagless. Ron’s two
cousins who work on the 80th floor of the WorldTradeCenter happened to be out
of the office. One was away on a business trip, the other took their father to
the eye doctor today! The mother called us earlier: Her husband's progressive
blindness had saved this son's life...
(*) Now re my remarks about those
who expected this disaster: Last year I attended a lecture by Richard Clark, US
Counter-Terrorism Coordinator at the National Security Council. He said
that Osama Bin Laden, a Muslim billionaire hiding in Afghanistan, had trained hundreds
of militants to attack the West. His operation was very professional. His plan
was--still is--to take over the West, the infidels. (He's behind the U.S.S.
Cole attack and others.) Bin Laden had already planted many highly
trained people in the US.
Some of them were known to the security authorities, some not. The problem was
with the INS. Our immigration laws are extremely lax. Coupled with a legal
system that grants instant rights to people suspected of trying to penetrate
the US
for hostile purposes, these men had been allowed to enter and were then told to
come back for a hearing "in 8 months." In the meantime they were let loose
on the streets of the USA.
Often, if the FBI or CIA can't
show the INS enough evidence about the INTENT of these suspects--only claim
that they know from secret sources that these people had been members of
terrorist groups in Egypt or
Syria or Algeria. Judges
then demand TESTIMONIES from these sources (How is the CIA supposed to fly in
the sources?) Needless to say, most of these terrorists simply enter the
country because of our liberal legal protection. They come in illegally and are
instantly being handed the Bill of Rights. Once they are here and are
legally cleared from any wrong-doing, the law prohibits the FBI to just follow
them or tap their phones... . The FBI must show the judge PROOF of these men's
conspiracies. To our question why didn't the
public know about it, Clark said that the
media considered these reports to be unnecessary alarmist and simply buried
them. So here we are. The day that
would mark the start of World War III.Talia

P.S. Two days later I got a call from a friend: Hundreds of cars at Long Island
train stations had been left there, their owners—commuters to New York City--never returned to claim them.

About Me

Talia Carner is formerly the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine and a lecturer at international women’s economic forums. The award-winning author of heart-wrenching suspense novels will soon welcome her new novel, HOTEL MOSCOW, (summer 2015, HarperCollins,) that will follow her previous successful novels, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, CHINA DOLL and PUPPET CHILD, all hailed for exposing society’s ills.